Good PAF tone

[fjgaston]

Hi
Some of you played real PAFs some of you are said to make the best PAF replicas. I want to know what really make the characteristics of a good PAF tone. I want to hear it.
So you have sounds you recorded with PAF or sounds of songs, well known, in which we can hear the characteristics of a good PAF tone, please post the sounds or video here.

If you know incredible sounds that can only be made by a PAF it would be wonderful.

Thank you.

[Possum]

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Sure, I guess I'll have to plug what I'm doing to reply to what you asked but I did exactly that in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08PC9vp2D6g
there are clips there that give you an idea of what the true characteristic of the PAF tone really is, and most likely its not what you think it is. I own two early patent sticker pickups and one is most likely earlier than that because it never had a sticker and came from a Gibson factory test guitar. The earliest patents are exactly the same as the PAF stickered ones. The good PAFs are typically on the bright side, I put one that is 7.7K in the bridge position and it is really bright, but stays out of the shrill range, which is another characteristic.

In the video I played the a real one to compare my version to, so you can hear a real one in a modern amp with fumble fingers Dave at the wheel, NO pedals, no chorus, just the guitar and amp and a touch of amp reverb.

I think historically why the bursts became popular with Bloomfield and Clapton is because the pickups are similar to single coil tone in a lot of ways and thats what attracted them plus the easier to play shorter scale and the extra fatness that single coils don't have. There ARE some PAFs that were a mis-combination of too many winds and a darker sounding magnet which would give you a muddier tone but they still had a characteristic in common with all PAFs. Generally they had alnico 2, 4 and 5 in them, and alot of non-oriented alnico 5 which is a bit similar to alnico 2. I don't know anyone who has actually found alnico 3 in them though Fralin says there were some, but I suspect he is just repeating unfounded verbage.

Why I like them is for the same reasons Bloomfield did, they have a nice vocal thing going on thats difficult to describe, alot of single coil feel, just great for blues and rock. They don't work at all for metal in my opinion, if you overlay alot of effects and super high gain fuzz they end up sounding like anything else, a real PAF wouldn't survive the high voluem without squealing like a pig anyway, and are dangerous to put in a potting bath because butyrate melts at low temperatures.

[fjgaston]

Thank you very much Dave for this video and all these informations.
It is exactly what I was looking for.

Did you specialy match the real PAF on the video for neck and bridge ???
But it my opinion the old PAF are really good for playing on a good high gain distortion, at least the real PAF I played with (on a 1959 Les Paul) was incredibly not dirty even with a high gain distortion.
I played with a Disto Blaster from Valve-art http://www.valveart-tech.com/ soloing like 80's heavy metal, very amazing.
But if you call Metal, the music some play with EMG active pickups, with a very very very high gain amplifier, then maybe the PAFs are not good for this music.

Dave, do you have a vintage gibson to compare real PAFs and your PAFs pickups on it ???
I'm curious about if it can reveal other differences on a 1959 Les Paul or 1961 SG with old Honduran mahogany ???
I'm just curious about it because those instruments acoustically "sound like bells", a bell reveal every frequencies.
I also consider it's not easy to analyze sound on youtube videos because of the compression (kind of really compressed mp3 or something).

Thank you Dave
I'll go on with my search of the good PAF tone maybe should I buy some real PAF on ebay or something to have them at home.

[Possum]

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Yeah you think like I do. I made the closest copy of that neck pickup to test how close I could get. This one uses an alnico 2 magnet, the one in the real PAF is probably non-oriented alnico 5. I just tried alnico 5 in that same pickup and it got even clearer sounding, I degaussed the magnet down to vintage levels as well which helped in some ways.

Here is the copy test video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij2F8wXH8nc
No I don't have a vintage Gibson, wish I did :-)
What I meant about high gain and distortion was that PAFs have a particularly sweet amazing kind of tone you only hear clearly at low volume levels without alot of distortion, just enough to get a little grit is best. Yes they sound great really cranked up but then they lose what makes them stand out from other pickups at lower volumes. there's a video on youtube of a guy playing a '58 through a Trainwreck with alot of gain and it just sounds like some Duncan pickups that way. Good but you can't tell they are real PAFs.

When watching videos on YouTube its really important to buy a good set of amplified speakers, not the junk that comes with your PC, those are terrible. Good speakers are cheap now.

If you can find a patent sticker pickup that is '62 the latest you'll have the real deal, in '63 they changed the magnet wire, still sounds really right but not quite the same, they also standardized the wind to around 7.7K

[fjgaston]

I have a pair of prodipe pro 8 monitoring almplified speaker and and a firepod sound card, so there is not any problem for listening good sound on my computer nut you know the sound in mp3 or on youtube is really not as good as a CD. that's what I wanted to point.
I studied sound engineering, listened to different qualities of sound I really can't bear mp3 compression anymore.
To hear the best, it's better to have a wav or aiff file or an audio CD or better, a SACD or DVD-Audio or analog tape.
OK youtube give a preview and it's interesting.
Do you match the pickups to have a higher resistance on the birdge pickup or do you use same resistance on both pickups.
Having the same or a close resistance on both pickups is maybe better for having a more balanced middle position, isn't it??

[JGundry]

Here is a clip of a neck PAF of mine I like the tone of. I'm playing through a Silver Face Princeton Reverb modded for a little extra headroom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yer-XGyZoYk

Here is a clip from my band practice. This is a very low gain clip playing through an 18 watt Marshall clone. The setting is even lower gain that Possum's clips. I'm the lead guitar on the left speaker. These are computer wound test pickups wound to PAF winding pattern specs.. I made them before I had the Leesona 102. Not the best recording but pretty good considering I just used a pocket Edirol R0-9 MP3 recorder in the middle of the room. Be kind we are not pros but we have fun.
http://gundrymedia.typepad.com/upsta..._my_baby_7.mp3

[Possum]

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Well unfortunately no one is going to post aiff files on the internet because they are huge and don't stream. I have a ton of audio on my website and if they weren't compressed hosting fees would cost too much :-) Plus mp3 files can be heard on Macs and PC's which is important as most musicians use Macs for recording work.

I use a calibrated set rather than same values, though in vintage days pickups were more likely to be about the same value for both or even neck pickup being hotter. The covered set in the first video is about 8.1 bridge and 7.6 for neck. One of the characteristics of PAFs that is really noticeable is that they have more of an almost tele middle position tone than modern buckers do, or you could call it the BB King tone :-) The Vibrolux sample is a good example of that and also the Bloomfield clip in video 1.

I posted on my website four different amp samples using jam tracks and the PF Stars and I don't compress the mp3's way down so maybe the sound there is better than YouTube, but still YT doesn't compress it beyond recognition, you can tell what they do sound like in person. The amp samples of mine are here:
http://www.sdpickups.com/humbuckers.shtml
I think PAFs sound different more than other pickups in different amps, there are some amps like my Victoria that if I use alnico 2 in the neck gets a little bit too dark for me. I switched that for alnico 5 and degaussed it and now it works in that amp fairly well; that amp is weird, a Regal II and will run on one power tube or two of many different types and many different rectifier tubes, its cathode biased but runs the power tubes on real low voltages, a nice amp but not loud enough for most gigs....

[fjgaston]

Thank you so much for all these informations.
You seems to really love the sound of the neck pickups, what about the PAF in the bridge position.
I think the sound of Jimmy Page is made of this, Am I wrong ????
Do you consider Jimmy Page's sound as a good PAF tone ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXUpdBvu3Vo
I really like Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck sound it always seemed to me that the bridge pickup was the best to make that sound, I don't often use the neck pickup.

[Possum]

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I focused on the neck first because that is the one where a true PAF shows what its made of, it is also the hardest tone to do right, Duane Allman's neck pickup was a real good one, Jimmy Page's neck pickup wasn't that great and you'll often see him in old videos shredding away then going to the neck then quickly going back to the bridge because his neck pickup is too dark and muddy. Thats probably why he coil tapped his pickups later on. The bridge pickups are easiest to nail the neck one is the tough one to do. You have to have the right kind of metals working for you or it doesn't work, thats why you see in my video that I make my own parts out of expensive stuff. You probably don't use your neck pickup because it won't cut through, most commercial products are like that and I hear that comment often from my customers about stuff they buy. Page's bridge pickup would be easy to do, but I overbuild my parts to get a little more character and tone down the shrillness a little. And yes Page's bridge is real typical, very bright but not completely shrill, and when you really dig in hard it gets a little fatter sounding. His really sounds like alnico 5 or non-oriented 5 to me. Gundry's neck pickup and mine are both real good examples of great PAF neck tones, that tone just kills me, I love it and it was what I was shooting for. I wish I had a big Marshall to demo these through, but those amps are too loud for any uses around here, you can't play a small club with some Marshall stack :-) I have an 80s Studio 15, real rare but I don't think it compares to the real deal :-)

Just FYI in this fifth clip:
http://sdpickups.com/audio/altneckvibro.mp3
I play the neck pickup first then go to the bridge which is a real PAF, if I had a big Marshall it would sound like Page's pickup, amps are a key part of the tone too.

[Possum]

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Forgot to mention in that clip the middle is out of phase so don't confuse that tone with the bridge tone. the neck in that one used alnico 5 but I used a different kind of magnet wire, which sounded good in the vibrolux but not in the other amps so I don't use it in these. I'm still doing alot of experiments with the metals, they are very sensitive to magnets and wire, small changes are easily heard in the tone.

Gundry by the way owns two different winders that were both used in winding PAFs, one of them actually WAS used to wind some slug bobbins on PAFs at the Gibson factory, the other one is like the one Seymour Duncan owns but wasn't actually used at Gibson. The old winders had a peculiar way of winding in a very crude way, so they had some elements of hand wound tones in them.

[fjgaston]

I may have the same problem than Jimmy Page had, all of my neck pickup have always been muddy, when I played the real PAF one of thing I said to the owner of the guitar when he pulled up the switch to the neck position was "I didn't know I can have that sound with a neck pickup!!!!"

There is another point that is important, every one don't have the same taste. Here in Paris in clubs many people try to play Chicago blues or something like that some of them have good guitars, good pickups and good amp, but most of them use the neck pickup (many of them have bad pickup also) with more high frequencies on the amp.
I don't really like these neck pickup tone. Or it's not that I don't like to hear it but I don't like to play with that tone. Most of the music I listen is English Rock, my favorite guitarists are Jeff Beck end Jimmy page and if I'm not wrong both of them use much their bridge pickup. That's maybe why I like the bridge pickup bright sound.

Another point is Bridge pickup is supposed to produce more harmonics because of where it is, it also seems to have more dynamic and more sustain.
I use birdge pickup and make attenuations with my right hand, having a sweet picking when I want a sweet sound and a wild picking when I want to have a wild sound. I also switch from plastic pick to hand picking (and sometime use coins to have a very bright strange sound).

For the moment I only use stewmac Pickup parts and Mojo supply Plain Enamel that actually is elektrisola Grade 1 (single build ??) I think my pickups doesn't sound like real PAFs but sound better than most of today's gibson pickups. I'll try other magnets and other wire etc... to get my tone.

here is a sound clip of jeff beck : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHdB7YRysr4
I'm not sure if he uses PAF on it but but I think he is mostly using the bridge pickup. Do you like this sound ?? I think it's very expressive. But Jeff Beck is a very talented guitarist that is a reason why he can get this sound.

[greenfingers]

I think Jimmy Page started to have trouble balancing his neck pickup in a live situation when he changed his bridge pickup, before when he had the double white in the guitar it had a more even sound when going from bridge to neck.

So when he got the sound he wanted with the T -top bucker it was not the best settings for the original neck paf. Eddie Van Halen had this same trouble with his 59 les paul so he just ripped out the neck bucker

I dont think Jimmy's neck paf is a bad sounding one, it just dose not compliment the T-top, my understanding is the neck is wound higher than the bridge wich wont help things, maybe he should swap them around?

[Possum]

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No, Page's neck pickup wasn't a bad sounding one, I've seen a video where they did a slow blues tune without being real loud or alot of gain and it sounds really good, and he only played the neck. He favored the bridge pickup so had his amp adjusted for it in videos I have so of course flipping to the neck pickup it gets muddy, some guitars have this problem. I can do a neck pickup that really cuts through using these metals, you have to use alnico 5 really to do it, alnico 4 works too, the set in video one is really balanced and neck isn't muddy. One thing a tech told me, is that he worked on alot of those old guitars and told me the pots were often way out of spec, like 650K pots which brightens up the tone, so thats one thing you could try in your guitar if you can find something like that. I got some of the Mojo plain enamel and unfortunately its really fat, so while you get a pretty clear tone out of it it makes coils that are a bit too fat. The spool I got measures .0028" I tried stretching it but it doesn't want to :-) It is 42 but its nom-max size. Nice wire but more suited probably for strat pickups and tele bridges, should work good in a bucker bridge but probably not in neck.
Another thing to look at is your tone caps. RS GuitarWorks has some made by Jensen I think for a woody tone that might be worth trying out. I can build a neck pickup like the one you played that you liked, or go find an early Patent Sticker '63 or earlier for neck position. BTW in the Epiphone I have NOS real bumble bee caps I traded a guy for, they are 400V so big but I like them.

[greenfingers]

Thats a good point about the tone pots, I try to measure them with a multimeter before i put them in the guitar. Higher value for the neck and lower for the bridge, but all around the same area in value, nothing too far apart

Just 050 difference can help add or take away some treble from the overall sound. so a 650k in the neck will help give you a bit more bite than 500k

[kevinT]

here is a clip of 2 of my PAF-style pickups. Mine are more on the woody side. But I also love that metallic clank PAF sound as well.

1st verse Lord of the Blues bridge A4

2nd verse Vintage 57 bridge A2

Played with an Epi Les Paul, from Crate club 30 amp with a bit of delay.

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6688524

As you can hear, PAF tone can vary quite a bit as in real life.